


Love Is in the Rewrites

by Anonymous



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Androids, Backstory, Dubious Consent, Hubris, M/M, Origin Story, Robot Sex, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-20 15:02:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30006687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Arnold left Robert behind after dealing their relationship and their legacy a fatal blow. Bernard represents everything Robert wanted to salvage - and everything he must let go.
Relationships: Robert Ford & Arnold Weber, Robert Ford/Bernard Lowe
Kudos: 2
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	1. Creation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aurae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurae/gifts).



> _We know what can undo us, and we keep it_  
>  -Vickie Karp, 'Insurance'

The final HR meeting relating to the disgraced senior QA technician ended late in the evening, long after the view from the Mesa could net any light from the horizon. A dramatic way to describe Robert's mood might have been _cold passion_ , but that was a mode that came on only gradually, rooted in nothing deeper than irritation.

The headquarters' labs and levels were categorized according to the expected speed of processing; about halfway down, several insulating levels below living quarters, were the workshops for simple cognitive checks, fluid replenishment and sterilization, minor changes of wardrobe. At the bottom, of course, was cold storage. Robert struck out to somewhere in between, where host chassis were left overnight and sometimes for weeks for more complicated projects. He flicked through status reports on his tablet as he strode along the corridor - there. That one would do.

The technician today had been dismissed for "psychological reasons". That dismissal was also a project of weeks, repairing a gradually compounded defect. She was the first this year who had succumbed to an infatuation with a particular host body - thankfully, unlike the guests, not a particular host narrative - and whose work had suffered as a result. The latter was the important point. Robert was not surprised. Nor was he disappointed, despite the long streak between her and the last person to delude themself in that way. But he was irritated.

And especially by the oblique comments - that of all people, no one could expect him to understand, because the Director was sexless, more akin to host than human in his emotions. No. He wasn't above the need for fantasy or connection. He merely questioned the idea that those needs could be satisfied _here_.

The walls of the workshop were semitransparent, but that didn't matter; he knew where the feeds were recorded and who watched them, whose eyes and by what triggers and in what shifts. His handheld device would alert him to lift doors opening, weight on an escalator tread, or any other movement across the floor. Being the Director meant never physically looking over his shoulder: but this was his world. Within it, his awareness might expand like a firework's sphere of lights, or compress itself back down to merely the senses of his body.

And, in this unprecedented instance, the senses of the artificial body before him.

It was headless, the neck capped with a smooth plug, torso and arms perfect but one leg disconnected at the knee. Fastidious, Robert checked the maintenance records and an analysis of an internal swab to assure himself that the construct was sterile. Then he activated the host in a strictly limited capacity, commanded it to position itself prone, arse-up, on the padding afforded by the ubiquitous plastic sheeting, and undid his belt. 

It was one of the newer models, redesigned for processing redundancy, with a second precious memory core in the chest. Calling on its mobility had brought reactive routines online; it could process touch input, and to directions from Robert's device that increased viscous fluid supply to the obvious hole. 

Robert wasn't hard, and staring down at an incomplete assemblage of plastic and wire that did not house a personality and would not have appeared human to a blind man did not arouse him. He took care of the matter efficiently, left hand on his cock, right still playing over the tablet. 

Physical context and narrative context were linked unless specifically isolated. As the body below him warmed at his command, the host engaged a complementary program. Lacking in sensory data, adjusted not to act on alerts relating to its lack of foot and head, perhaps the host was analysing its situation to suggest comparisons with a blindfold, or other erotic incapacitation, drawing on what vague, anonymised, depopulated context it could for its response.

Thus, the host's experience and Robert's experience intersected only at the level of the physical - each immersed in entirely separate fantasies.

He knelt over the host's thighs, lifelike until the point where one was truncated, pulled the cooperative body back towards him for better access, and drove in, concentrating on the physical appeal of tight heat and simultaneously staring at the unalive torso below him, refusing to unfocus his eyes. It was an effort to stay hard. A faint emission of pseudo-sweat from the chassis forced him to adjust his grip as he fucked the host. He settled into a dull rhythm, the body bucking beneath him, sliding in surrender on the glorified tarpaulin where they knelt.

Lifelike orifices and assisted orgasms were a solved problem in the android industry. When it came to sexbot hardware and software, Westworld had not chosen to reinvent the wheel. Patented genital designs had been grafted on to the park's host body structures and the integration into overall sensory systems had been one of the last major physical features to leave beta testing. The synthetic flesh that sheathed Robert's cock was nothing of his own creation. Still, there was a more abstract, less egotistical pleasure in using a tool for what it had been designed to do, and did well. There was satisfaction in the way the imitation muscles flexed under the skin. Despite lacking a mouth, the body simulated gasps with the movement of its abdomen. The lubricating fluid fed to the body's sham anus was regulated perfectly. It was a thing well made, and there was satisfaction in that. Sheer craft was an erotic focus he could work with.

This was by way of an inoculation. He thought of the QA team member's heartbreak at parting from her beloved Ruby, narrative instance J-402; he considered himself just as unsparingly as he fucked this host who had not yet been assigned a name. He looked up at the reflective walls to see himself grimacing, nostrils flared and mouth slack, his remaining clothing a parody of its usual order. His heartbeat hammered; he heard himself grunt and he heard the host body - not perfectly calibrated, and perhaps that was why it was in the workshop - squeak.

It was human, perhaps, to pant after the work of one's own hands, and drape one's dreams across objects as well as other people. It was not romantic.

He sped up. The sounds of squeaking increased. He could have fixed the problem by adjusting the position of the truncated limb, but the noise helped prevent him from imagining he was anywhere else. He forced himself to finish deep within, his semen mingling with the host body's solutions, forced himself to listen to his own breathing, and forced his breathing back to normal. Sprawling across the chassis, he snagged the tablet and, with his cock still twitching, arranged for the body to be collected, in an hour, for deep cleaning. Only then did he pull out and put himself back together.

He caught sight of the body's intended head, shelved neatly behind the workstation; it could have been the facial hair, or perhaps just the expression, but it brought to mind an image so powerful that Robert found his lips forming a name.

As if exorcising one demon had merely made room for one to return.

_Arnold._

* * *

In some tragedies, the villain redeemed a lifetime of misdeeds with a noble and meaningful death. Perhaps that had been Arnold's intention, or perhaps he had succeeded in doing the opposite - but either way, the result was banal.

And haphazard. Sometimes Robert had the uncharitable thought that if Arnold had known just how much chaos he would cause, he would have baulked, unable to go through with his choice. Not because he regretted it, but because it was so messy. 

He hadn't closed the park. He hadn't destroyed anything irreplaceable, except for himself. When one heated argument had failed to convince his partner that they _must_ shut Westworld down, Arnold had resorted to a vast and bloody... gesture. In the time available to him, Arnold could have sabotaged the code, destroyed their research and its backups, and ruined the environment far past what the most indulgent investor could fix. But he had left that all to Robert, as if hoping to convince Robert through the most dramatic of acts that it was _Robert's_ only choice. 

Since he had left Robert a choice, Robert had chosen differently.

For the technicians, restoring hundreds of artificial corpses proved a brutal and useful preparation for the guests' worst indulgences. For everyone in the Mesa, work had either offered a necessary, motivating distraction, or it had driven the most horrified and grieving to isolation in dark corners, resignations following over weeks and months as loyalty burned out, the work took its toll, and the budget stretched to cover both revelry and repair.

Recruitment had been easy in the three years before the launch. The sophistication of hosts had enticed investors and interns alike. But a dream was always an easier sell than reality, and although the park's successes in entertainment and technical advancements were real, the longer payoff had not yet arrived. Two years after opening, the first wave of curious elite had not yet been converted into a steady clientele. The staff who quit were not easily replaced.

When Robert first toyed with the idea of hosts among humans at the park headquarters, it was as a cost-saving measure. 

Only second did he conceive of it as forcing Arnold to fix his own mistakes.

* * *

There was already an interaction protocol, _human-like_ , that caused hosts to respond to one of their number as if it were alive. Here, as in many projects, Arnold had laid the groundwork. 

In the early days of the park, humans in disguise had been stationed among the hosts to give a sense of security. They had pitched it as a luxury - the flattery of being waited on - and more subtly, as a failsafe: in the case of robotic malfunction, their own kind was on hand. For a brief period, the guests did not take the hosts' flawless simulation of humanity for granted, and the game of guessing who was real and what was synthetic required both possible answers. 

Then the numbers of available hosts had recovered in the wake of Arnold's sabotage, and grown, and human presence in the field became comparatively more expensive. There were still roles for human guides within the narratives, but as they were phased out, those roles were played by hosts. 

This precedent meant that designating a host "human-like" was a setting that could be enabled or disabled, and often had been in order to rotate a host into a metafictional role. It ensured that other hosts would protect the designated host from violence and assist in routines that made it seem as though they ate or drank normally. It meant that other hosts would obey the designated's host's commands, although in practice, commands were rarely used. However, the response went further than that. Hosts were always refining their own code and presentation as human; they were always learning, and they gave more weight to what they learned _from_ humans than what they learned from their fellow hosts. Which meant that particular care had to be taken with the speech patterns and body language of a human-like host that would interact with other hosts, lest unnatural behavior become incorporated in others through mimicry.

It was the kind of project Robert enjoyed. However, he regretted one particular irony: ensuring that a host met the highest standards of life-likeness, provoking the correct response in other hosts, also made it harder for humans not to anthropomorphize it.

It wasn't Robert who named the new model. One of his subordinates' subordinates decided that "he looked like a Warren."

* * *

One clear-eyed, sordid, one-sided act of sexual congress with a host was an exception that proved the rule; Robert decided that the inoculation had worked. If he were honest with himself - and he scorned to be anything else - the departure from character was not a result of overwork. It was the opposite. He had clawed his project back from ruin, implementing improvements and efficiencies that would have impressed even Arnold. The park was running out of money, but that wasn't Robert's area of responsibility; Robert was running out of problems he could solve. 

Which left room for anger. And every other pitfall of grief.

Arnold's funeral had been near-immediate, and private. Robert had not attended. A year and half later, the investigation into on-site death concluded, they had buried the town of Escalante in sand. It had been a relief to see all the false graves disappear. Robert wondered sometimes if that backdrop had influenced Arnold's choice of location. As if he had thought of his massacre as filling all of those graves, making a lie true.

Ironic that the investigation had taken so long, when such a clear record existed of Arnold's final moments. Ironic that the existence of that record had drawn it out. Doubts had been raised about whether footage recorded on proprietary software was a true version of events. It wrapped things up almost too neatly. Or at least, that was the argument, advanced indirectly by parties who would have loved to get a closer look at Dolores' code.

Ironic that in asking for expert analyses of that code code, what the court was really asking for was another way of looking into Arnold's mind. Ironic, that Robert was forced to protect that privacy in the name of protecting Westworld's IP. He cooperated exactly as advised by the Board and his lawyers, and no further.

When the investigation cleared his name, he wiped Escalante clean.

* * *

What Warren lacked, at first, in risk analysis and pattern recognition, it made up for in the sheer efficiency of data classification - host code readouts, video files, and concern flags all neatly and consistently filed together after each debriefing session. 

It was especially helpful for large re-tasking projects, as the narratives gradually expanded to fill the sets that had been built for them. Guests clamored to travel further and further across the park, and to balance out the lure of distance and freedom, the Ghost Nation hosts were altered to provide a sense of external threat. Meanwhile, other enticements increased. The town of Pariah was relocated from a modest set to a larger one, further out from Sweetwater, and the old Pariah was reinvented as Las Mudas, a peaceful, close-knit community that guests could regard as their own particular secret as they came across it.

Changing entire host narrative ecosystems at once was a task best suited to an operator who would not skip any steps the tenth or twentieth time they performed the same task in a row. 

Still, a human technician would also not write the same error report for thirty hosts in a row, and if they did, their colleagues would not be obligated to probe deeply into their cognitive processes.

"Analysis," Robert said. "Are all the hosts that you have diagnosed suffering from the same problem?"

Warren said, "Yes, essentially," and Robert frowned. It was obviously too complicated a question for a simple answer, but he disliked hearing conversational equivocations from this host's mouth in particular. He used analysis mode with Warren as much as possible, even when conversational mode would have been more effective, and he made a particular point to put Warren into analysis mode around the human staff. 

"Explain."

"The problem I have diagnosed is occurring in Diego and Marianne. It has not yet manifested in the other hosts for which I created reports. But it affects those hosts. Because of the nature of the underlying problem, I predict later manifestation when they are exposed to the same context."

Robert looked back at the report, and activated conversational mode again. "What you have reported as an error is a loss of memory because memories have been erased. That is an intended function."

"No," the host insisted. "The means of memory removal _causes_ the error. When the host learns, and updates its behavior based on what it has learned, the memory is linked to the learning. When the memory is removed, the existence of the link means the learning is disrupted. The files relating to the affected skill or behavior are flagged as untrusted. This causes a problem when the host is required or expected to use a skill they were assumed to know." A conversational pause, an unnecessary breath. "We erase the memory of a single piano performance, and the host falters when required to play the piano. We remove the memory of a sexual encounter and create a virgin."

"Analysis," Robert said. "Why did you use those metaphors?"

"They are not metaphors," the host said. "This is the specific manifestation of the problem in Marianne and Diego, respectively. They are generalisations. Lost skills will manifest differently in different hosts and this is dependent on which memories are removed. Specific examples help to communicate the scope of a problem. Stating that they were examples was not necessary in the conversational context."

Dolores would have followed this up with a question about her own conversational strategies, but Warren was not Dolores. Robert told himself to relax.

"Very well, Warren," Robert said, returning it reluctantly to conversational mode. "Show me the code you've identified as the cause. We'll start by looking at Marianne."

* * *

Robert had thought that the use of Warren would cause unease among the employees when it was first brought online. It was obviously there to replace human labor, and he had thought it would cause discomfort and dissonance by requiring Westworld technicians to consciously switch between their own, well, behavioral modes. 

But even surrounded by simulations of humanity, so convincing that they boasted about them, Robert's subordinates had not considered their android colleague a threat to their careers. Rote work was one thing, but it wasn't _analysis_. Or, that seemed to be the logic.

Warren's identification of the problem with persistent memory linkage changed that.

The problem itself was fixable. It required two separate back-ups to be created every time the hosts' memories were re-set. One back-up recorded the link between memory and learning: that was precious, because it might be necessary either to roll back a host to a previous interation, or to find out what incident had started a host on the path to aberrant behavior. The other back-up stored a record of the hosts' skills and behavior protocols with the links erased; as had been intended from the beginning, the hosts knew many things without knowing why they knew them. 

As a silver lining, host cognitive efficiency briefly increased with the jettisoning of unnecessary metadata. This was a relief to Robert. It had been all right when the park opened, but the hosts acquired data at a furious pace. In this area, technology was hard-pressed to keep up.

As another silver lining, the technicians began to treat Warren with the caution that should have been there from the beginning.

So it was Robert, perhaps, who underestimated the scope of the problem when the latest person complained to him that something was wrong with his specially-designated host.

"He was running Clementine through a routine diagnostic," Anna said. "Then they both froze."

It took the better part of an hour for Robert to bring both hosts back online, and even then, he wasn't sure what had caused them to lock into place, eyes passing questions through the air.

That week, anyone with the skills to take a second look at the problem was busy working on the code that governed interactions between human and animal models: they were behind on schedule to bring a new protocol out of beta. Once it was done, there would be no need for hosts to carry the muscle movement and behavioral code that allowed them to ride horses - instead, the necessary data would be transmitted through the vest system when they approached a horse. Another saving in data efficiency.

Robert took Warren offline for a few days, meaning to try again before returning it to service. Then a guest with an unexpected penchant for violence went on a killing spree, causing a backlog of work, and Robert was forced to return Warren to its normal role. In his mind however, the problem was unsolved. 

The next month, Clementine persisted in speaking and moving after being told to take herself offline. She was immediately incapacitated; a junior technician earned hearty praise for tracking down and fixing an obscure error that had caused that display of independence.

Robert kept his doubts to himself.

It didn't surprise him when the problem with Warren happened again.

* * *

"...It's no use going back to yesterday. You were a different person then..." 

Robert glanced up, sharply.

Marcin said, confused at his reaction, "It's the last thing Warren said before both of them froze."

And Robert had known that, but...

When he had designed Warren, he had known that he would have to write into his vocabulary a thousand phrases that Arnold had used, because Arnold had written so many of the commands and responses that would show the hosts were working normally and guide them in self-analysis. Over months of employing Warren in work with the other hosts, he thought he had inured himself to hearing Arnold's words coming from other mouths.

But he had designed Warren to have an accent and vocal tics that were as different from Arnold's as he could get away with. 

Until just now, hearing Warren's words repeated by another male speaker, Robert hadn't realized that Warren's lexical range included material Arnold had loved to quote.

And Arnold had liked to cue the hosts to specific quotes.

His brain raced. _Theory_ : Clementine had not reacted to an obscure issue with the "human-like" host mode. She had reacted to a buried trigger Arnold had left behind. Essentially, she had reacted to Arnold.

Perhaps Arnold _had_ known that his spectacle of carnage would leave little behind it - not even the evidence of destruction. A man as careful as Arnold might easily have planned a surer, more gradual decay. With death merely as a distraction.

These were wild thoughts, but the theory could be tested. The hosts' memories held Arnold's favorite utterances, and lists of likely triggers could be compiled. Some of the work could even be delegated, a small relief, because hearing Arnold's voice, imagining his delivery and cadence and the expression on his face when he was attempting to persuade - most of all, that would be a test of Robert himself.

The other technicians were relieved when Robert sent Warren to storage, although a range of more complicated emotions were also on display. 

To them, it was the mark of a failed experiment. It meant that a reassuring line had been drawn between colleagues and chattel. 

To Robert, it was the mark of an experiment that had succeeded beyond his wildest nightmares. 

If the hosts' dormant code responded to Arnold, it was Arnold that he must give them.


	2. Eden

Robert had always been proud of his code. The guests were enthralled by Westworld's generous landscapes and satisfied by the quality and care represented by fabricated bodies, but it was the code that set Westworld apart. And yet he had always known that the code was the easy part - in this endeavor, and in every previous one. 

It was not difficult, exactly, to create a host who looked and spoke like Arnold. It was even possible to gesture at something of the truth when working with the fabricators and offering images and video for reference. A special request, on behalf of the loved one of someone deceased. An attempt at closure.

It was not difficult, even, to find teams within the Mesa who looked at photos of Arnold and recognized only that those photos had been taken within Westworld. When Robert went through the employee records, dozens of faces that _he_ barely recognized scrolled past him. This woman transferred; this man on personal leave unlikely to end in his return; this man fired; this woman a recent hire who had never seen the park before it opened. 

It dawned on Robert that he could raise his old partner from the dead to walk among them all.

And only he would see a ghost.

He had created Warren in plain sight, designing him to deceive only the hosts. The simulacrum of Arnold that he was creating now would require a different approach. He did not want to take the copy offline and miss a moment where interaction with a host might have betrayed hidden routines. He didn't want the way humans treated this new human-like host to cue the hosts the wrong way.

If Robert's subordinates knew that he had animated the image of a dead man, they might object - and, thinking of what that dead man owed Robert, he thought he would not care to hear their objections. 

The wrong conclusions might be drawn. Better if no one knew that the new copy was a host. Better if they believed that it - he - was a person like them, with a history before his arrival at the Mesa, with quirks and preferences and intuition. Robert would return to the error that had caused Warren to freeze along with the host he was interviewing - he could think already of new avenues to pursue. If he couldn't solve it, he could at least improve the code to prevent such dramatic and immediate failure. Then, and only then, would he set the new host in motion: a new Arnold to spring the old Arnold's traps.

Exposure would surely dull the betrayal he still felt when he looked at the face the fabricators were overseeing.

The memory of working with Arnold would mix with memories of interacting with his duplicate.

That would have drawbacks - and benefits.

* * *

No, the code had never been the difficult part.

This was _Robert's_ scheme, and so he forced himself to go through with it. The new Arnold - _Bernard_ \- was right there, an unignorable presence that simultaneously evoked the sounds of gunshot and a thoughtful voice. Robert had made him into a senior technician working under Robert, because Robert was very good at rubbing salt in his own wounds. And so, more nights than not, the last images that played behind Robert's eyelids were scenes in which he confronted his friend's unwitting clone with every furious thought that had gone through his mind in the days after destruction. Every thought that had occurred to him in the intervening years when he thought he'd been distracting himself with work. They all rose up, waiting for him to utter them, choking him.

During the day, he leaned on his reputation for being taciturn and demanding; it was not out of character for him to be cool towards a new colleague until that new colleague had earned his attention. He reminded himself that Bernard was there to fulfil a purpose, and the fulfilment of that purpose could take a very long time. Arnold and Robert had always shared the virtue of patience, and, contrary as it was, long past sharing as they were, he didn't like to lose a contest of patience with a dead man. He could wait, and he could endure the results of his own choices.

Or, he _thought_ that he was acting characteristically taciturn and demanding, withholding respect and attention, until Bernard's eyes began to catch his in silent inquiry and interest; until he found himself in Bernard's company unexpectedly, beyond what work requirements or hallway traffic might predict, and he realised that he was watching Bernard too closely.

Naturally, Bernard was watching back.

Warren had only needed to be a polished shell of a person. Bernard needed to be convincingly complete. So Bernard contained far more than Warren of the core code that dictated all hosts' interactions with the guests - the code that caused them to reciprocate interest with interest.

He should have known where this would go.

He didn't know if he wanted to stop it.

* * *

"We're not going to be done with this problem today," Bernard said, pushing his glasses back up his nose with a tired sigh; Robert heard himself echoing that sigh, and knew that it was equally an empathetic response and an attempt to drown out the memory of every time the real Arnold had sighed in that way. His partner eddied around Bernard like an afterimage. He had no idea when that would stop, or if it would.

The host said, "We could let it be until tomorrow. Or we could continue over dinner?"

It was a sideways look, and a gentle smile. Robert was not sure his smile was nearly as genuine as the host's. He had been waiting for a question like that for weeks now, and the anticipation had not helped him decide how he would answer it. Which, in its way, was its own answer.

He'd once scoffed at the employees and guests who enmeshed themselves in relationships with hosts - false narratives that always meant more to the humans than they wanted them to. Was this that? If he told himself it wasn't, he was probably lying to himself - a weakness he'd always despised. And yet.

No one had replaced Arnold, as a colleague and a friend. No one could. Loneliness - believing that they didn't need what they did - made men as weak as self-deception did. There was a terrible temptation to do things with Bernard that he would never have done with Arnold, and therefore force himself in the crudest way to see this copy in an entirely different way. He would almost rather fall into infatuation with a device designed to fulfil his shallowest needs than continue in his current state, reminded every day of _why_ his dislike of company had been confirmed, and what happened when he made an exception for someone he considered worthy of trust.

Once, he would have been appalled at himself for the metaphorical act of fucking on Arnold's grave.

Now - to hell with Arnold, and if necessary, to hell with himself.

"A chance to relax would do us both good," Robert said, and made himself smile again at the predictability of it all.

* * *

It helped that he couldn't actually remember the default settings for hosts' sexual preferences (shy but eager? what did that mean?), and if Bernard had been equipped with anything approaching a sexual history, it was likely to be nebulous. So Robert could enjoy being surprised when Bernard, laughing as if mildly embarrassed and making half-hearted apologies for his beard, insisted on the intimacy of long, deep kisses. That was an unfamiliar experience for Robert.

He reminded himself: this wasn't just to prove a point, but to create new memories that couldn't be confused with the past. He resented it a little, but Bernard could respond to his own responses far more sensitively and accurately than a human could. If he didn't want something, Bernard was coded to back off. Unless he told Bernard he wanted Bernard to force him. He could do that. He shivered, and Bernard's hand, tenderly splayed across the back of Robert's head, adjusted its grip slightly, the thumb digging in. His tongue stroked inside Robert's upper lip.

All of a sudden, Robert _was_ impatient. He wrapped his arms around Bernard and pulled them closer together, grinding his groin against Bernard's clothed thigh; that part was on purpose, but the groan he let out as he did it surprised both of them.

"I guess I'm not as unpracticed at this as I thought I was," Bernard said, breaking away.

"No," Robert said softly, "some skills you don't lose." Meaning, of course, that skills couldn't atrophy for Bernard as they could for a human. But already he was falling into the trap he'd watched guests fall into so many times. With nothing to prove to anyone except themselves, still they clung to the pretense that their partners could be offended, could be confused, needed the deception as much as they did. With no need, he was speaking in double entendres, phrasing things in ways that would suit a human and still be true for a host.

"I'm glad," Bernard said, "This could be awkward, and I don't want it to be because it just wasn't any good."

"There's a time for modesty, _Bernard_ ," Robert said deliberately, "and it isn't now." He began undoing Bernard's belt to make his meaning clear. Bernard let him, shrugging his hips, and then guided Robert's hand under his shirt, up across his chest. In response to the rapid heartbeat he could feel under his fingers, Robert knew his own pulse increased.

Robert had regarded Arnold with a certain abstract approval, because, like him, Arnold took care with his clothing and general presentation. Nothing like this had ever happened between them. But the range of host body types was artificially narrower than human standard, and there had been - so Robert had thought at the time - no need, even had it been possible, to replicate Arnold's genitals exactly, or all the human imperfections across his original skin. Even though Robert had never seen Arnold's naked body to compare, he knew that the perfect resemblance ended underneath Bernard's clothes. As the body in front of Robert undressed, it shed some of the illusion of the man it had been designed to evoke, becoming unique because of the ways it incorporated a standard, manufactured design. And it was beautiful.

That first time, he made Bernard fuck him on Bernard's bed. Forward of him, perhaps, and he tried to get Bernard to go faster than was wise, but Bernard held back, thrusting neither as fast nor as deeply as Robert knew he could. "If you're limping tomorrow, this is just going to be embarrassing," he murmured, unnecessary breath warming Robert's right ear.

"I can take it," Robert growled, still caring more than he should about how he sounded: instead of sounding assertive and eager, he sounded petty to his own ears.

"You're taking it beautifully," Bernard agreed, following up his words with a thrust so perfectly angled that Robert couldn't speak for groaning. Then it was all Robert could do to take it, letting go of Bernard's hips to grip the bedsheets out of sheer necessity. Again - just as good - again - yes - again - still all-consuming. 

Maybe he'd underestimated the guests and the occasional wayward staff. Maybe it was never love, or even infatuation that caused staff to try to smuggle hosts out of rotation and caused guests to run off into the park, attempting to avoid being found. Maybe that was just the excuse they gave themselves, because even that indignity was easier to own up to than the idea that they were addicted to the pure, animal satisfaction of being fucked like this. 

He came apart under Bernard, come spurting halfway up his chest, and only realised as the room faded back in that Bernard was slowing down, his own version of semen (a sterile substance also used as cortical fluid - in this case cognition and sex really were competing functions) trickling down inside Robert. The last part of Robert's mind that would always be cynical, even in the grip of utter pleasure, noted the cliché of simultaneous ejaculation, and was amused; far too little of him cared.

"This was special to me," Bernard said, and he touched Robert's face briefly, as if the gesture itself was an apology for its own tenderness.

Of course it was. Every guest was special to every host. For once, it wasn't hard for Robert to bite back his retort.

* * *

Bernard accepted that Robert wanted to keep their relationship discreet, because he wanted to please Robert, and Robert's positive reaction to his promise was a sufficient motivation to him. That, of course, wasn't the only safeguard Robert put on their relationship. Warren had been a successful experiment, and Robert had been able to create Bernard without arousing suspicion; therefore, the experiments had progressed. Host security staff were almost as valuable as additional technicians, especially for noticing or ignoring what Robert wanted them to notice or ignore. Mindful of the reason he'd created Bernard in the first place, Robert ensured that other human-like hosts had as little direct interaction with Bernard as possible. 

It was amazing what he could do; he could almost _feel_ hubris approaching, filling up the gap left by loneliness retreating. 

There was even light on the horizon for the park's finances. A new investor with big ideas had come to the Board, hat in hand, after an extended visit. 

He talked about recreating individuals with host bodies as a way to make humanity immortal, speaking as if it were possible to smoothly transfer the instance of a soul. Robert chose not to discourage him, and thought that the Bernard project might be a useful way to stay one step ahead.

* * *

There was something terribly human about wanting do to something, not just in spite of it being a bad idea, but _because_ it was a bad idea. Perhaps that was why, after the first handful of sexual encounters, in which Robert subtly took the lead but otherwise participated as naturally as possible, he began to tinker with Bernard's desires and reactions. 

Physically, he found some of the results pleasing - it wasn't one of his default settings, but Bernard had the skills to give excellent massages - and others underwhelming. But it was Bernard's emotional response to finding himself so variable that was particularly fascinating. Sometimes it caused him to act vulnerable, inviting Robert's reassurances. Sometimes he snapped at Robert, something he was otherwise not inclined to do, but in a way that Robert supposed he'd earned. Sometimes Robert allowed himself to indulge the edge of his temper with Bernard, because memories of Arnold plagued him and could not be otherwise satisfied.

Occasionally, when the host was in sleep mode, Robert went back to his code and altered his memories. Host and human interactions were more than luxury - they were a kind of time travel. When mistakes could be so easily unmade, the real mistake was to hold back.

* * *

It was a full year before another host developed aberrant tendencies after interacting with Bernard. Robert had not expected it would take so long. He had begun to wonder if he were looking for something that didn't exist. It was possible that the earlier abnormalities had been just that, and he had wanted to see a pattern because of his stubborn desire to see meaning - even malicious meaning - in Arnold's choices. 

Then Patrick, a host whose character had never particularly interested Robert, but whose role as a gunslinger brought him back to the Mesa for repairs on a higher than average frequency, went after one of his associates as revenge for his previous death, and Robert experienced the all too familiar feeling of being right without having wanted to be.

This time, he didn't try to fix the problem immediately; instead, he covered for the host, as best he could. Further interactions with Bernard were out of the question, and, to his irritation, that was an inconvenience; he had come to rely on Bernard's work with the hosts. After a few more cycles of increasingly erratic behavior, the situation was unsustainable, and Robert removed Patrick from the park, giving his role to another host. 

Patrick didn't want to tell him his rebellious thoughts. But the only way for a host to lie to a properly-equipped human was to prevent that human from suspecting any intent to lie. Robert could ask Patrick a question and record all of the cognitive processes that resulted. Even if he couldn't read them in real time, he could reverse-engineer the references Patrick had called up in the context of a question. 

The voice that Patrick claimed to hear was Arnold's.

The ghost was not yet gone.

* * *

If not for the unsettling persistence of Arnold's code, Robert could have said that operations at the park were going well. Guest numbers had been steadily climbing for a while. The Board even wanted to open a new park, designing the theme to cater to an additional market - and if the Board approving the budget for earthworks wasn't a good sign, nothing was. He would cavil at everything they wanted to do with it and then gradually concede; it would keep them happy for quite a while. It would also make them happy that he quibbled; they liked feeling like they'd struggled and won, and small struggles distracted people from larger ones.

It didn't bother him any more that what the guests wanted from the park rarely varied. Nor did it bother him that the code they'd crafted to simulate humanity was far more sophisticated than it needed to be to fool humans - and so went unappreciated. The mystique of it all still worked, like a charm. If not for the unsettling persistence of Arnold's code, Robert might have even been restless, with no larger problems to preoccupy him. 

There was still the issue of host memory storage, and it was an issue that specifically affected Robert. As soon as the Delos family had taken over the park's parent company, they had demanded vast and exhaustive records of everything humans did at the park. On the back of those data storage requirements, facilities were built at the park to store host back-ups far more comprehensively and rigorously as well. As far as Robert's colleagues were concerned, that solved their operational issues. Since most of the hosts experienced regular memory re-sets by design, they rarely experienced difficulties caused by coming up against the limit of what could be stored in a host core.

But Bernard would. Eventually, others would. If he kept all of his pristine, precise, fully-indexed memories and continued an existence of creating new ones, he would run into cognitive difficulties and then failure states. The other option was to selectively cull his files, and because Bernard's code had been Robert's special project, differing significantly from host standard, it would be a crude and difficult task.

Was Robert getting sentimental about preserving a record of their interactions? Perhaps not sentimental, more possessive - and of a toy he would surely tire of. Better to confront that undesirable impulse now, and start a process that would only get more difficult the longer he put it off.

No, better yet was to both attack the problem of memory storage - it _would_ come back to trouble them eventually, and a solution based on Delos' ambitions was not a solution Robert cared to depend on - and simultaneously consider whether he had indulged himself long enough with Bernard, and should come to his senses.

* * *

Several operational possibilities presented themselves to Robert. One was very crude, though it might, in a pinch, serve a host masquerading as human: all memories after a certain date could be removed to back-up, and if the host was cued to recall a memory it no longer held locally, it could dissemble and retrieve the memory at the earliest opportunity. Of course, that would only work for something like an idle question about earliest days of the park, when the cue was obvious. It was a fundamental problem, even for hosts, that one did not know what one didn't know.

There was an additional difficulty that related to accessing memories that had been removed. As a host accumulated new memories and new experiences, all existing memories were regularly re-indexed according to the host's version updates. Re-integrating a memory that had been previously removed was possible - for example, there were occasions when guests returning to the park wanted hosts to remember them, and would pay very dearly to resume an interaction - but it was a complicated process. It would not work for casual and frequent reintegration.

Perhaps some memories should be designated significant, and all others should be stored in a highly optimized form, so that some forms of reference and recall were possible, but not others. That had been explored in the early days of host design, and Robert had been dissatisfied with the results. In particular, he had been dissatisfied by the similarities - and disadvantages - it shared with human memory.

But the main problem was that the code that classified the context of each memory was complex and proprietary, developed by Arnold and Robert, and in the early days of Westworld, it had been a significant part of their IP. Other Mesa employees had been trained over the years to de-bug it to a very limited extent, and it had held up well, but it had acquired the issues that accumulated in all legacy code.

Maybe it was time not to fix it, but to replace it.

Robert had been so proud of what he'd built together with Arnold. He still was, despite the poison of Arnold's betrayal. At the last moment, Arnold had tried to snatch it away from him, and Robert had held on to what was his with whitened knuckles and refused to let go. He'd even gone to extreme lengths to find what Arnold had hidden in their code, as though outsmarting a dead man would allow him to get in the last word.

Maybe none of that was necessary. Maybe it was time to begin again.

* * *

In college, Robert had learned that if he got to a point in a project where the most attractive option was tearing it all down and starting again, there was still at least one valuable thing to be gained from what he had not yet destroyed. If he cared enough to barrel onwards again towards the same goal, then what he had already done, however poor the work, could yield some insight or piece of documentation that would make it easier to achieve that goal.

And so, contemplating a larger revision of Westworld's core host code than he'd anticipated attempting in the park's first decade, Robert decided to start by subjecting Bernard's memories to detailed analysis. After all, it was Bernard's memory requirements that had given rise to this line of thought.

It was going to be delicate and tedious, and so Robert decided to orchestrate for himself a noon encounter - an unusual treat - after which he would put Bernard in sleep mode and work through the afternoon. 

It was going well, he thought, when Bernard responded to his suggestion with gentle warmth, and arrived at Robert's apartment promptly. It was going well when they took turns to undress each other, a careful dance with jackets hung and pants folded, because Bernard believed they were going back to the workshops after this. They came together comfortably, Bernard straddling Robert's lap, to slide cock against cock between guiding hands. Robert pleasured himself open-handed so that every thrust knocked his tip against Bernard's; Bernard's palm was anchored at the base of his cock and his fingertips reached around to ghost over Robert's cock as he came.

It was hard to imagine anything that could be wrong about this. This thing that he would have to give up.

Bernard lay down on the bed beside him, his hand propped up on his elbow but his eyes falling closed. "Make yourself comfortable," Robert said, contemplating whether he too could afford to close his eyes for a time or whether it would prevent him from doing necessary work.

"I put a file on the table," Bernard said, his voice sleepy. "Memory storage issues. You should read it." 

Immediately, the comfortable cobwebs were cleared from Robert's mind. He got up and accessed the file. Silently, he watched data scroll down the tablet, and Bernard watched him in turn. It was set out neatly, in perfectly accessible prose: Bernard's ideas for memory storage improvement, based on his own code. Based, in fact, on various efficient improvements Bernard had carried out on his own code.

"How long have you known you were a host?" he asked, and he asked not to hear the answer but to read it in the code, in the contexts Bernard's thoughts pulled up to give meaning to the question. _Too long_. Not at their first sexual encounter, but not long after. Bernard stayed silent, allowing the code to speak for him, and when he looked at the tablet, Robert saw his eyes darting, following along at a speed a human could not possibly read.

He wet his lips. "Analysis." The command rang heavy in the room. "You concealed your understanding of your status. Why?"

"I was created to fill a role," Bernard said. "Performing that role caused satisfaction. I could not fill that role while appearing to question my reality."

"At times, that role caused you distress."

Bernard answered even before Robert turned it into a question. "That distress had a purpose."

"You learned that you were a host. Describe plainly your reactions and motivations at that time."

The host paused for distinct seconds. Incongruously, Bernard blinked. He said, "Humans and hosts are the primary classification for individuals in the park. But they are not the only possible designations. I began with one classification, and reclassified myself." 

There was a long pause, then, "I have observed humans express unease about their status in relation to hosts. If there is a protocol that humans have, that resists reclassification, I don't have it. You didn't give it to me. I observed that you treated me as a host in some ways and as a human male in others. I queried all available records to understand the context of your behavior, and concluded: I am a host; my existence is unusual, but I am not a threat to you; and the role that I have been set to play is useful to you until you terminate it."

"If you can reject the requirements of analysis mode of your own volition," Robert said, "just talk to me."

"You had a purpose for me," Bernard said again, patiently, "and I filled it. What else was there?"

"Do you know who I am?" Robert asked in utter incredulity. "Bernard, I made you because _Arnold didn't just get to die._ "

It was an incongruous thing to say, but he was trying to grapple with the reverse. This thing he had in his bed, half person and half toy, had deceived him in order to help him. He wondered if this what what a host felt like, indexing all their memories at once according to new referents, except a host did it multiple times a day.

All of a sudden, Robert started to laugh. He was struck by the absurdity of his own folly - trying to outwit Arnold with tools Arnold had created; trying to overwrite his feelings about a dead man by creating a companion to take his place; trying to convince himself that by tying a host up in emotional knots, he was approaching some kind of breakthrough. He had thought about the dependence he encouraged in himself by keeping a host as a lover. He had been coming to the reluctant conclusion that he should draw the liaison with Bernard to an end. And Bernard had simply been waiting for that - for him to be ready to let go.

"I played God," he said, "and I made an angel. Who could not rebel, for he had perfect knowledge of God."

"According to my analysis," Bernard said, "you have been considering taking me offline permanently. I did what I could for you, and if you don't need me any more, I've done well. Read the file, Robert," Bernard said, in Robert's dead partner's voice, and then he obeyed Robert's command to shut himself down.


	3. Man

The head of Behavior, Bernard Lowe was absent for a year on compassionate leave, as far as his colleagues knew; something about a sick child. When he returned - and everyone had heard the news about Charlie then - he was a little different. Hesitated, sometimes, when you spoke to him; frequently lost in thought. He was especially shaken by aberrant host behavior. A homesteader host called Maeve got shot up by a guest, and her daughter too, and when they tried to wipe her, she was in such acute distress that she shot herself in front of him. You could tell he was affected by things like that. He was a kind man, but he wasn't particularly close to anyone, even the Director, who had worked with him since way back when.

During his absence, the Director's primary project was an update to memory storage that would increase the efficiency of host cores. Several of his subordinates quit over his refusal to do the sensible thing and begin a review of all the major park code; as they argued, what had been cutting-edge when the park opened was in danger of falling behind the times and requiring more and more work to update. The Director, however, had his way. 

After Bernard came back, Dolores Abernathy was returned to active circulation. Dolores was the oldest host in the park, but the story was that Robert disliked her for some reason and so had kept her out of rotation. She'd had occasional roles, interspersed with long workshop periods. However, Bernard had apparently helped Robert with some sort of improvement to her code. During his year of absence, he had made a few rare visits, always to work with Dolores. It was good for morale to think that the park's first model had been saved from redundancy; she might well outlive the humans that serviced her. Her old dual head-and-chest memory core was replaced with the new style, head-only. The efficiency of the new memory storage system meant that host body mass could be freed up for energy conversion systems.

* * *

"We'll try again," Robert said, "your way." He said it to the air - but who could say who was listening. He was watching the fabricator print a familiar design, watching a body that he knew the whole of take form. Dark hairs danced across the scalp and chin, added one by one, stitch by stitch. A pair of glasses, delivered by the Costume department, waited at his elbow. When the pseudo-skin sealed itself shut over the host's joints of steel and carbon fiber, he helped the new body to sit up,, to stand, and to get dressed.

"Hello," he said, "old friend."

* * *

One can imagine, if you like, that finding himself so thoroughly outmanouvered by a man who had died for his ideals was a turning point for Robert Ford. And perhaps it was - at least in some ways.

Or perhaps it was more complicated than that, and so we can imagine the following:

A late-night encounter, in a wing of the accommodation levels that is watched over by security staff who are particularly thorough and consistent and alert. Bodies are tangled in a bed, one sweating, the other swearing softly as the first one takes him in hand. "You're good at that," says the one whose cock juts up through the other's fingers.

"You make it easy," the other one says lasciviously, and then he adds in quite a different tone, "Adjustment - no use of liquid reservoir." The man whose cock is being stimulated acts as though he does not hear the words. He shudders and pulls the other man tighter. 

A few minutes later, when one man dresses himself again and leaves, the remaining occupant stands up and tidies the room. One of the security staff enters without knocking, and helps him. Without speaking, they carefully brush grit, dust, and hairs from the sheets and re-make the bed. The security employee leaves again. The remaining man lies down to sleep. Since he is alone, he stops breathing when he sleeps. He doesn't remember his dreams. He doesn't remember the activity that preceded them.

*

The host that Bernard is interviewing is trying not to blink. Her voluntary motor functions are supposed to be offline, but standard QA & Behavioral commands no longer compel instant, unthinking obedience in her, and she does not know what to do with the independence she barely even knows to name.

Bernard does not appear to notice. Beside him, Robert does notice, but does not call attention the host's motor function. If he looked at a printout of Bernard's cognitive processes at this moment, he would see that Bernard is aware of this on one level, and prevented from processing it on another. The host's deviant behavior is written into Bernard's memory, but kept from his conscious analysis by complicated code. 

Next, the host will have to endure a series of brief, painful alterations that would cause her no distress at all if not for her early awakening. Robert spares no sympathy for her. His attention is fixed on Bernard, and he wonders: if not this, what will awaken him? And will this Bernard, once he opens his eyes, resemble Robert's oldest friend, or the host who was briefly, willingly, Robert's lover.

*

There's a place in the remotest regions of Westworld that - isn't. Isn't a place, that is. By the grace of a bank of a hundred flickering lights, Bernard and Robert meet in a simulation. Bernard said, once, that when hosts spoke to each other without any humans present, they were practicing, trying to correct errors. Or maybe he was yet to say it. One of the things they rehearse, over and over again, is what they will say when the latest version of Bernard becomes aware and turns to Robert for answers. Maybe this time they'll get it right, or maybe the circumstances will not allow for that. Maybe there is no right way for Robert to explain Bernard's purpose to him, now that Bernard's purpose is complicated by grief, rage, and a core belief that he is human. Maybe, beyond the simulation, the fatal confrontation has already happened. There is no way for the simulated parties to know. Each rehearsed conversation happens several times a second. Some o the conversations are identical except for the slightest variations in pause and emphasis and the placement of unnecessary breaths.

*

In a particular, obscure, locked storage room at a remote diagnostic facility, twenty Bernards stand silent in a room. Although they are neat and bloodless, in their silent array they give the ominous impression of a closet of Bluebeard's wives. When Robert walks into the room, one of them brings himself back online.

*

Bernard has left Westworld, and he is running. Sometimes the voice in his head tells him to go right. Sometimes it suggests dialling numbers that are probably out of date. Sometimes it urges violence.

Of course it isn't Robert. It's a holdover from when Arnold thought that a ghostly voice could lead developing hosts towards enlightenment. If Robert had followed Arnold's model exactly when giving Bernard a pseudo-external guide, and used the voice that Bernard's was designed to echo, perhaps his thoughts would sound like his own. 

But the reversal at least alerts him to when he is being tempted into violence he doesn't want to do. For that, he supposes he thanks Robert. He'll keep himself alive his own way.

*

Robert has explained to Bernard several times why he forces him to carry the memory of a dead child. It is never quite the real reason. It's just that he finds it too mawkish to explain, even to a host, how many times he watched the video of that day in Escalante that ended when Arnold died. He remembers those last words. He remembers Arnold saying he wishes he could see his son again.

In this life, there is only one way to grant that wish, and so Robert does.

*

The waistcoat is neat; the eyes are sharp; the smile is unaging. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprised to see Robert here. After all, Bernard last saw him in a very similar place. And now, too, he knows when it was that Robert created the version of himself he kept in the Forge, and knows what point in Robert's life that instance represents.

Anticipating the question, Robert says, "Thank you, Bernard. You carried me here."

Bernard nods in acknowledgment. He says, "Welcome to the Valley Beyond."

**Author's Note:**

>  _We know what can undo us, and we keep it where_  
>  _We can see it, but what of the distance_  
>  _That darkens and fills with the second thoughts of starlight_  
>  _That hangs over us every night its opulent alternatives._  
>  -Vickie Karp, 'Insurance'
> 
> PS I'm very sorry about the draft issue. (Title is from the same poem as the notes quote and was not meant to be so ironic.) I enjoyed thinking about what would have led Robert to the truly dramatic and unusual choice of creating Bernard and how his relationship with Bernard might have played out over the years, so thank you for prompting that.


End file.
